Since 1997, an obscure US organisation has been promoting a preemptive and explicitly aggressive approach to securing American dominance in the 21st century. Under cover of such terms as "benevolent hegemony" and "preventive war", they have spent the last years elaborating their plans for the use of excessive military force to intimidate the rest of the world. Many of the key supporters of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) entered the White House along with George W Bush in 2000, and have been instrumental in designing and launching the war on terror in general, and the occupation of Iraq in particular. This week, a People's Tribunal opens in Brussels, Belgium, to try the PNAC for their part in dragging the world into a state of permanent war. The BRussells Tribunal, inspired by the hearings held in 1967 by philosopher Bertrand Russell into American war crimes in Vietnam, is just the first session in a series of citizens' forums which will be held around the world over the next year, and which seek to expose and condemn the dark face of current American foreign policy. As the Tribunal opens in Belgium,Frederick Bowie spoke to participants about what they hoped to achieve, and what the world needs to know about America's neo-conservative palace revolution.

A beginner's guide to PNAC

Al-Ahram Weekly talks to Jim Lobe, Inter Press correspondent in Washington DC, and 'defence counsel' of the BRussells Tribunal about the fundamental delusions inherent in the Project for the New American Century

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What is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)?

PNAC is really a shell organisation. It's not so much a think-tank, as a forum which is used by neo- conservatives, in particular, as a way of gathering allies on policy issues and then publicly asserting those views. So it's a coalition-building device. Most of the ideas that PNAC expresses are based on the views of people who belong to other organisations, think-tanks or lobby groups. These people represent different ideological trends and different interests, but they come together as PNAC to say: we agree to this position, and this is the position the administration should follow. So PNAC is mainly a platform. It circulates statements for people to sign, and then it discloses those statements publicly as representing the views of a broad coalition.

People often point to the fact that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz all signed the PNAC mission statement as a sign of its influence on the Bush administration.

The PNAC charter doesn't go into a lot of detail. It essentially endorses a vision first drafted back in 1992 by Zalmay Khalilzad under the authority of Paul Wolfowitz, then under-secretary for defence policy, and his aide I. Lewis Libby, who is now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. The main idea which Khalilzad put forward was that the US should remain the dominant power in the world for as long as possible, and that in order to do this, it had to be able to preempt or confront any possible rival that might emerge to challenge it. His paper was leaked to The New York Times, and caused a great scandal. Its grandiose scale didn't suit the temper of the times. The Democrats in particular attacked it very strongly.

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Gary Bauer, William Bennett, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld

When PNAC was founded in 1997, they got together a group of people who accepted the Khalilzad-Wolfowitz vision. Their major work as PNAC can be found in two books, Present Dangers, which was published in 2000 to support Bush's election campaign, and Rebuilding America's Defenses, which came out the same year. But all these people have worked together in various guises under various administrations, and in some cases they go back 25 years. The origins of this core group date from the mid-1970s, when neo-conservatives like Richard Perle and right-wing hawks like Rumsfeld and Cheney, who were then in the Ford administration, came together to take on Henry Kissinger and attack détente. These people have been associated very closely ever since. But even within this ideological current you can find a number of sub-currents.

Is it fair to say that PNAC's thinking is now the dominant current within the Bush administration?

The PNAC group came into the Bush administration quite strong, but not clearly dominant. Then when 9/11 happened, they already had these plans on the shelf, and they could immediately take them down and say, this is how we're going to deal with the war on terror. And Bush liked that. So from that point on the PNAC coalition became dominant.

First they had to go through Afghanistan and oust the Taliban, because of their implication in 9/11. But their key near-term goal was ousting Saddam Hussein. You can see that very clearly from a letter they already published on 20 September 2001. There are different currents within the PNAC coalition which had different reasons to want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The classically hard-line neo-conservative current was very regionally focussed: they believed that by ousting Hussein, you could transform the balance of power throughout the Middle East in favour of the US, and of a so- called 'alliance', headed by Israel, but which also included Turkey and Jordan.

But there was also a current within PNAC which had a more global vision. For them, the reason to go into Iraq was to assert our ability to control vital resources that might be needed by any possible future rival of the United States anywhere within Eurasia. That might mean China, that might mean Russia, it might even mean the European Union. So for them, going into Iraq, the country with the second largest oil reserves in the world, and saying, "We can come here whenever we want and no one can stop us", was a way to preemptively intimidate China, which badly needs access to Persian Gulf oil to fuel its own development, as well as other potential rivals.

Both these currents could very easily come together over Iraq. But once the invasion of Iraq was over, there was an almost immediate split among the PNAC people. This can be seen from the open letters by PNAC that were also signed by individuals from other more mainstream organisations in March 2003. These were letters which said that since the United States was now in Iraq, it should be strongly committed to rebuilding Iraq, and that in order to do that, we needed to have better ties with Europe. This was an implied attack on those associates of PNAC, like Rumsfeld, who have always been much more unilateralist, and much more ambivalent about relations with Europe; In particular, it was a direct attack on Rumsfeld. Already in July 2003, William Krystol, the PNAC's chairman and founder, was writing editorials in the Weekly Standard attacking Rumsfeld, accusing him of being willing to make too many compromises to get out of Iraq fast, and of needlessly alienating partners whom we needed to sustain our plans for reconstructing the country. So there was a gap between those people who simply wanted to go to Iraq and crush Saddam, and those who wanted to go into Iraq in order to transform both that country and the whole of the Middle East.

By now, I think that PNAC is in many ways a spent force. The one issue on which all the people involved could agree, the ousting of Saddam Hussein, is no longer relevant. I think it's highly significant that PNAC hasn't produced any publications of its own for around 15 months now, other than the occasional article by one or two staff members. There is too much disagreement among the various faction on priorities and tactics, both within the administration and outside it.

As a result, what we've seen since last September is a resurgence of realist influence on the administration. The Powells and the Armitages and the Scowcrofts, who were never very closely associated with PNAC (though Armitage did sign one or two PNAC letters prior to 2000), now exercise as much influence as the PNAC group does in many key policy areas, and possibly more.

Isn't that also partly because the ideological assumptions of people like Rumsfeld are now failing the test of reality?

PNAC's ideas are now much less persuasive to the American public as a whole, and also probably to people like Condoleezza Rice, and maybe even George W Bush. The assumptions that the PNAC crowd brought with them about how easy it would be to invade and occupy Iraq are being punctured one by one. And this in turn reflects on their overall credibility vis-a-vis Iran, or Syria, or North Korea, or especially China. The Bush administration began with a very strong anti-China platform, and that's been pretty much overruled now. So I think they are having much more difficulty making their case.

Plus, there's an election coming up, and in order to regain some of its fast falling popularity, the administration has to show greater moderation. So the result is a relative moderation of US foreign policy. The question is, is that moderation just tactical? And then, if Bush wins in November, the PNAC crowd will reemerge, revived and reunited, and ready to take on Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China? Or is this a strategic moderation, so that even if Bush wins, the realists will consolidate their position and marginalise the hard-line PNAC views, as Bush's father did after Reagan? It's not clear at this point how it will play out.

But barring a miracle in Iraq...

I think they're fundamentally deluded. Their views are much more ideological than they are based on reality. And I think that's been shown dramatically in the events of the last year. What's remarkable to me is that they have any credibility left at all at this point.